by J. S. Morin
The whereabouts of such luminaries as Nora109 and Ashley390 were a matter of public record. Toby22 had multiple reports that placed him in his back garden of arboreal England. Plato was a prisoner. Charlie7 was dead.
Only Gemini knew to account for the recent movements of one James187.
Oh, the crafty huntsman had concocted a plausible lie about a tiger wandering loose in a panda habitat. There might even have really been a tiger. Gemini wouldn’t have put it past James187 to release one himself, just in case.
But the robot helping Eve14 hadn’t made his skyroamer disappear. That might have been a little too suspicious. It was also going to be Eve14’s downfall.
As the Great Ghost City rose on the horizon, giddiness bubbled up inside Gemini. Sleek, powerful hands tightened on the controls. Feet tapped with pent-up energy. A grin spread across the old geneticist’s youthful mask.
“Oh, she’s never going to suspect a thing.”
Eve14 thought Evelyn11 was dead. In a way, the girl would be right. Gemini was free from bondage in a robotic chassis. Much as this new form was growing on her, the body known as Gemini was a means to an end. Soon, Charlie25 would repeat the process and house Evelyn11’s mind in the body she deserved—no, earned.
With a few minutes of travel left, Gemini flicked through the computer database and found some Tchaikovsky to listen to. As the sweeping orchestral compositions began, Gemini found the complexity jarring. The notes tried to stymie her rioting enthusiasm with mathematical rigor.
“Must not be in the mood,” she muttered.
Scanning the database, Gemini tried Vivaldi, then Mozart. Neither suited her mood.
The skyroamer veered toward Earth as Gemini split her attention between flying and arguing with the music database. Her inability to find a suitable soundtrack for her impending triumph had become an annoyance. Noticing the rapid approach of the ruin on the other side of the windshield, Gemini gave up and shut the music off.
“Must be the ears. Haven’t acclimated to proper taste. Hope it’s not too late in cognitive development to remedy.”
Was this mind even subject to further development? If so, would Gemini still be the same Evelyn11 that got uploaded?
“No matter. Eve knows how to appreciate composition.”
Gemini circled the city rather than fly directly in. Most of the steel had oxidized to dust centuries ago. What remained were parking garages, highway support pillars, civic monuments, and foundation after rubble-filled foundation. Anything that wasn’t built from stone or concrete had given way to the ages. The robots hadn’t refurbished this corner of Earth yet.
Time to think logically. Where would James187 hide Eve in all that mess?
An automaton could clear an underground section large enough to hide a human in no time at all. But food, clean water, and waste disposal would pose logistical dilemmas, so the choices weren’t as varied as they first appeared. Eventually, easy egress and access to power and data would become priorities.
Eve14 was a thinker; no thinker could live isolated from the world of information.
But it was unlikely that Eve was doing the planning for this safari. James187 was the man of the wild. The Great Ghost City was as much a wild place as any marred by human hands. Manmade hillsides, underground rivers, and vast caverns intended for public transit all shared similarities with terrain the hunter knew.
James187 was the one Gemini had to track down. Eve would be with him.
Gemini landed on a public plaza half covered in soil. It was a central point from which to launch a search on foot. The pockets of her cargo pants bulged with oatmeal bars and juice cartridges; one held a fold-out headband with a straw attached that allowed her to drink from a plugged-in cartridge without taking up a hand.
Before closing the cockpit canopy, Gemini removed the one weapon she’d brought along. Charlie25 had given it to her, based on Plato’s design. A magnetic pulse rifle.
Menacing to the point where Gemini had been loath to even touch it, it was a murder machine for robots. Charlie25 had fired it point blank at her head to make a point. Gemini wasn’t a robot. While the localized magnetic field worked on the same principle as the crystal “cleaner” on the upload rig, the rifle worked at long range.
If things went according to plan, James187 would be working to hide Eve14 for the uploader’s conspiracy. But the hunter had never been a part of the inner circle. The only name he knew was Evelyn’s, and he had believed her to be ‘38 at the time, not ‘11. He’d be on the lookout for a contact to earn his way back into good graces with the masterminds.
If things went according to disaster scenarios… well, that’s what the rifle was for.
“Won’t finish if I don’t start,” Gemini muttered, heading off for the nearest entrance to the maintenance sublevel of the city.
As she walked, Gemini patted a pocket of her jacket. Safely tucked inside was an impact syringe loaded with sedative. A pocket in her pants held an innocuous supply of cable ties. Combined, they’d allow Gemini to quickly sedate Eve14 and bind her for transport.
“Getting ahead of myself,” Gemini grumbled. Did she talk aloud this often as a robot? Without archival data available at the twinge of a thought, she couldn’t verify that hypothesis.
The streets were barren, covered in windblown soil and specks of pre-invasion asphalt. Gemini coughed the dust from her lungs every time the wind gusted. Particulate caught in her eyes.
Blinking was a foggy memory but a newfound necessity.
Sooner rather than later, Gemini wanted to be off the streets. First off, she hadn’t raised Eve14 as a fool; the girl wouldn’t seek shelter aboveground when none of the buildings was sound. More importantly, Gemini was getting sick of dealing with the weather.
Dr. Evelyn Mengele had been a bookish child, a library haunt throughout her schooling, and an office-bound professor the remainder of her life. The outdoors had never appealed to her.
Evelyn11 hadn’t needed fresh air but also never cared one whit about temperature or precipitation.
Gemini was developing her own opinion of the fickle whims of the Earth’s microclimates.
“Mother Nature can shove this dusty wind back up the orifice that belched it forth.” Not a bad first try. Next time, Gemini promised herself to work in a proper cuss word or two.
There!
Gemini saw it. An arched hole in the side of a man-made hillside suggested a tram tunnel. Just a few meters inside, sheltered from satellite and aerial drone view, was a familiar jet-black skyroamer.
“Ah, James,” Gemini said with a chuckle. “Don’t ever change. Oh, and blast me six ways from sundown. Jimmy. Jimbo. Anything but ‘James.’ And no ‘bloody.’”
Gemini cleared her throat. “Yo, Jimmy. You’ve but one moment before I lance you through the cranium with magnetic waves. I suggest you surrender the girl without putting up a fuss.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Gemini knew her attempt at a threat was horrid. Body or not, she just wasn’t a fourteen-year-old rugby princess.
“Maybe I should just blast him and be done with it.” Gemini then marched past the skyroamer and into the tunnel beyond, the barrel of her EMP rifle leading the way.
Chapter Twenty-One
Eve sat on a concrete slab of rubble, munching on a rock-hard biscuit that threatened to chip teeth with every bite. Between that harrowing first crunch and the morsel being safe to swallow, Eve studied her surroundings.
A pair of lamps cast weird shadows around the abandoned transit station. Concrete pillars turned into prison bars fanned out along the wall. Two copies of James187 toiled along opposite walls, clearing space for a blanket.
“Good thing you had all this stuff,” Eve commented, taking a drink of tepid water from a thermal canteen. She forced down a mouthful of the gravelly grain; it was rubble but on a smaller, slightly more edible scale.
James187 grunted. “You’re lucky I didn’t have my dogs along, or those biscuits would have been long gone by now
. The water, too.”
“You have dogs?” Eve asked, perking up. “Charlie7 promised me a dog but never got a chance to do anything about it. Ashley252 won’t let them on the hovership for safety reasons.”
James187 scoffed. “What’s an Ashley going to know about dogs? Best thing for a kid is a dog. Gotta be a monster to teach one to hurt a person. Ask me, they should have cloned the lot of you girls a litter to raise, one per Eve. And before you ask, no, you can’t have mine.”
Eve closed her mouth.
For a time, she let James187 work in peace. He was doing all this for her, after all. A makeshift home was still a home. Even if the air was dusty and the walls a little crumbly, Eve would be living here for a little while at least.
“When can we go after Plato?”
“Priority one: find a steady supply of food and clean water. Priority two: take care of your sanitary needs. Priority three: basic equipment like a stove, encrypted computer, maybe a change of clothes. Priority five billion: launching an assault to rescue a high-priority prisoner from a group who only has one prisoner to watch.”
Eve rolled her eyes and stood to stretch. “You’re a pessimist. Examine problem, diagnose solution, implement.”
“Well, unless you have a solution for the dozens of robots and hundreds of automatons who might be guarding Plato, we’re on hold in the rescue department.”
A wicked grin lit Eve’s face. “Chernov’s solar magnetic lens.”
A hundred-kilo hunk of concrete dropped from James187’s limp fingers. “Where the hell did you hear about that?”
Eve shrugged. “I’ve got unfettered access to the Earthwide now. Well, mostly… anyway, if we could just—”
“Stop right there. We’re not building a moon-sized magnetic rod and maneuvering it into orbit. First off, that would be a decade-long undertaking, even with all the automatons we could ask for. Setting aside the fact that someone would certainly think to ask what we were doing building a doomsday device in solar orbit, the whole theory was bunk. Junk science.”
“No one ever disproved the theory. We could at least—”
“No!”
“—consider it as a backup plan,” Eve concluded. She was going to say that they could launch the effort in parallel using hacked automatons. Every good plan had a backup plan behind it. Hers shouldn’t have been any different.
James187 stopped clearing debris and came over to crouch at eye level with Eve. “I need you to think of yourself first. You want to help Plato? Fine. You certainly owe him that. I get it. But you can’t risk yourself. Whatever plan you undertake, you’ve got to put your safety ahead of Plato.”
“Right,” Eve agreed. “If it gets dangerous, we’ll pull back and try again.”
“No. I mean ahead of Plato, not the rescue plan. If it gets dangerous, you may have to choose between your welfare and Plato’s freedom, yes. But there may also be a chance during any rescue plan where it might come down to saving your own life or Plato’s. You’ve got to choose yours.”
Eve sprang to her feet. Raising her hands in exasperation, she walked away from James187. “Why can’t I choose to risk my life for something important to me? I’m not a museum piece to put behind some glass wall so no one can ever touch it. I’m not even unique; there are seven more of me back on that hovership. They have dozens more in prenatal development. I’m not an individual; I’m part of a production run.”
“Eve… there may be others made from the same DNA, but there are none like you.”
Eve looked over her shoulder at her co-conspirator. “If I’m different, it’s thanks to Plato. Your circular logic falls in on itself. Rescue one of the others instead, and she turns into me.”
James187 put up a hand. “I heard something.”
Eve strained her ears. She couldn’t turn up her auditory acuity, but cupping her ear helped. Her heart pounded in her ears as a sound approached from down the transit tunnel.
Footsteps. And they were getting closer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Keep talking, you idiots,” Gemini whispered so softly that she wondered if her own ears actually heard.
The old tramway had a magnetic rail system that corroded to nothingness long ago. But the central support was a quarter meter concrete ridge along the middle of the tunnel that was largely clear of the dust and concrete chunks plaguing the rest of the passageway.
A spotlight wobbled along, looking where Gemini looked, turning when Gemini turned, and swinging wildly when she overbalanced. The faint purple glow was in the UV spectrum, shining from the emitter built into the side of a pair of goggles that let her see it.
Walking a balance beam while keeping a weapon leveled was more of a challenge than Gemini anticipated. All the Eves made obstacle courses look like child’s play.
Either this body was a klutz, or Gemini needed more practice in it. Whichever was the case, the EMP rifle found more use as a tightrope walker’s balance pole than as a potential weapon. Still, it was either walk the narrow beam or give away her approach by crunching along through the rubble.
The indistinct voices began to take form. Eve’s voice was more familiar to Gemini than her own—well, Evelyn11’s. All the girls sounded alike at some level. But their speech diverged the older they grew. Eve14 had been the scientist, crisp, direct, and unapologetic. Eve15 was meek as a mouse. Eve16 had pushed the limits of Evelyn11’s tolerance for flippancy.
James187 sounded the same as ever, but Eve14 was someone Gemini hardly recognized. This was the Eve Fourteen from the Human Committee news feed reports. Her little girl would never have talked to a robot the way Eve Fourteen was just now.
These tunnels were pointless. The city had never needed underground transport. A civic vanity project, that’s what it had been. And now, a thousand years on, Gemini was paying for that pretentiousness with sore feet and an ache from straining to balance the whole way.
Eve14’s voice carried from the distance. “If I’m different, it’s thanks to Plato. Your circular logic falls in on itself. Rescue one of the others instead, and she turns into me.”
Gemini snorted. The reflexive response to Eve14’s childish notions came with a little puff of air. It wasn’t just a noise anymore.
In her bemusement, Gemini missed a step. One booted foot slipped off the beam to plant in the concrete gravel beside the track.
“I heard something.”
A string of unladylike curse words played on Gemini’s lips. She had the self-control not to lend them the force of her voice, but the damage was already done.
Why James? Why did you pick now to make yourself useful? Chasing Eve14 in the first place, the hunter hadn’t shown the faintest inkling that he could find a human. Now he was echolocating them like a bloody dolphin.
Stealth be damned. Gemini swung her EMP rifle into line with the end of the tunnel and trudged forward, crunching in the gravel with each step.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gemini’s pace slowed. Anger had spurred her forward. Roiling blood, fresh from an embarrassing miscue, sought to drown doubt in action. Now, a preoccupation with her own fragile mortality crept in.
What if James187 was armed for a sport hunt instead of a capture?
What if Eve’s watchdog preferred to shoot rather than ask questions?
The two of them—human and robot—knew Gemini was coming. Her careless slip off the track had assured that. Whatever came next was a result of that error. If eight hundred years of dreaming and scheming were to be undone by—
Stop! Gemini ordered her thoughts away as she paused. After a few steady breaths with her eyes closed, a pleasant tingle flooded through her body. This was no time to lose her focus again. Every neuron needed to devote itself to a singular goal.
Get to Eve.
Gemini started forward once more. The grinding of gravel under her boots echoed in the silent depths. The eerie purple from the UV goggles lent the concrete of the old tram tunnel a cyclopean aspect, like something out of
a Lovecraftian horror rather than a civic rail service.
A scientist should never have feared ghosts but this was as good a place as any to start. No human had ever called this place home. The city was pre-built for an industrial boom that never materialized. From decorative fountains to the bones of public lavatories, everything had been in place for a metropolis population.
This was no place for a living soul.
Gemini stopped. Without the plodding regularity of bootsteps, her breath bellowed like the stacks of a steam locomotive.
Eve and James187 knew someone was coming. If they could hear her breathing—and how could they not?—then James187 would know it wasn’t a friend. All the friendly humans were cooped up in a flying hen house, school-marmed by Noras and Ashleys.
Any wild humans were a danger.
James187 would be ready.
Gemini was prepared to turn back. She could return to the skyroamer, contact Charlie25, and arrange for a more covert assault on the hideaway.
Crouching in place, Gemini pushed the goggles up and rubbed her eyes. Think! The human mind was a pandemonium of rampant chemicals all vying to overpower reason.
So, James187 was ready for an intruder. Marching in like some biological version of The Terminator was no way to overcome that strike against Gemini’s plan. How could she adapt the plan without running to Charlie25’s skirts for protection?
Standing and pulling down her goggles, Gemini took one last huge, shuddering breath that cleansed her from loins to larynx. “Hello?” she shouted, voice echoing down the tunnel. “Is anyone down there? I need help.”
Slinging the EMP rifle onto her shoulder, Gemini winced. When did ten kilos get so heavy? Shrugging the weapon into what she hoped was a casual and nonthreatening position, the robot in sheep’s cloning strode down toward her destiny.